Cloud Changing How the SMB Works: Report

By CIOinsight |
Posted 01-13-2011

With cloud adoption accelerating rapidly, research performed by
MarketBridge, a provider of technology-enabled marketing and sales
managed services and solutions, showed that marketing and sales are
leading business applications while security is becoming a cloud asset.
The company released the preliminary findings of a December survey of
1,000 North American midmarket and small businesses and their adoption
of cloud-based information technologies, finding 44 percent of
companies claim to have at least one business application on the cloud
and more than 70 percent indicate they will move more within the next
12 months.

The report found mobility is driving cloud migration, with 38 percent
of respondents indicating that the need to support greater workforce
mobility is a trigger for cloud adoption, and early adopters are growth
companies -- companies growing greater than 10 percent per year were
nearly twice as likely to move software and infrastructure to the
cloud, the survey found.

Research indicated marketing and sales were the most accepted cloud
applications: While 36 percent of companies using marketing automation
do so via the cloud, and 29 percent of CRM is cloud-deployed, 49
percent of companies are planning to move one or more of these
applications to the cloud within 12 months. In addition, 52 percent of
respondents preferred to deploy on some sort of "private cloud" as
oppose to multi-tenant public clouds and 48 of respondents believed
that data security would actually be better on the cloud, recognizing
the investment and expertise needed to establish and maintain secure
computing environments